Organizing markups in a Studio session

Simon Shukro

We typically have quite large review sessions that can reach thousands of markups from dozens of users. Many of our users, as well as our suppliers on the receiving end, ask for better ways to organize markups. Most commonly to group a set of markups to discuss at coming meetings or to assign to different users for further processing.

The only field in the markup list that you can change if a markup belongs to a different author is status, a field we use to indicate which action needs to be taken for that specific markup. In other words we can't use status to organize them.

Right now we tell our users to export csv files, group markups in Excel and cross reference between Revu and Excel using the page number. Another way is to notify a colleague that's also invited to the session for every markup you want to group. Does anyone have a better workflow, preferably contained within Revu?

This would almost never be an issue if the markup list search included fields from replies as well. That way we could reply to everything we needed to group using simple codes. Another great addition would be if the markup list could be filtered by the user that changed a markup status instead of just the author of the markup.

Luke Shiras

I haven't done this but I think using Layers would be one solution. Unfortunately, layers need to be created before uploading to a Session and I'm not sure if you can assign a markup to a layer while in the session.

https://support.bluebeam.com/online-help/revu2017/Content/RevuHelp/03--View/01--Tabs/Layers/Layers.htm

Colby Gallagher - TfNSW - DE Manager

We have fairly extensive custom columns that each reviewer needs to ensure all the metadata of a comment is filled out. We have fields for discipline, comment type, project milestone, priority, etc. Gives lots of ways to use the filter functions in Bluebeam to slice and dice the data how you need.

Simon Shukro

Thank you for your suggestions. I have tried both layers and custom columns. The issue with both is that the fields can only be edited by the markup author. We need a solution that allows our own project managers as well as our suppliers project managers to edit the fields to determine priority, assign ownership etc.

Luke Shiras

I see. The best idea I can come up with is Status groups that are set up for each group but that can get complicated.

Let's say you have three groups - Owner, Designer, Contractor (this could also be various subs, but you get the idea)

Each group would have its various statuses; VE, Accepted, Revise, Coordinate with Consultants, etc. but each group status would be prefixed by an abbreviation; O-VE, O-Accepted, etc.

Now each user/group can change the status and you can use the filters to organize them. The problem this doesn't solve is when you need different users/groups to comment on the same thing. Alternately, you could try using the Reply feature with or without changing statuses.

Simon Shukro

I'll experiment with groups and see if it satisfies our needs. Thanks.

If replies could be filtered and searched then everything would be solved…